Open technologies gained a lot of momentum in the past couple of years, but what became of the term Open ? Does it still hold and mean the same values it did previously ? Were the purists speaking about differences between Open and Free right ?

A painful fact is that Flash 10.1 is not currently available for the Nokia N900 (well, at least painful for N900 owners). If we look at the bigger picture, applications (like my version-forging TweakFlashVer) uncover a few non-N900 specific problems with the way things are done in Flash land.

After a short historical overview and a short list of growing pains, in this, third installment of the mobile Qt app story, I will focus on what boulders remain in the path of widespread adoption of Qt among app mobile developers. Most of the technical groundwork has been laid down, but to reach a final resolution, it needs to include a bit more than just a healthy base.

After my last blog post that discussed the Qt toolkit's history, present and future in the Nokia ecosystem, in this second part of my blog series I will talk about the problems of Qt adoption among developers so far and the effects these problems had on (the lack of) mobile Qt applications today.

As part of a testing and compatibility effort, Nokia announced Qt to be officially available on Maemo 5 (i.e. the Nokia N900) on the Maemo Summit in October 2009. A lot of time has passed since then, and despite the sizeable Qt developer community and popularity of Qt on desktops, the number of Qt applications remained fairly low. This is true for both among the (admittedly few) commercial apps and in the (thousands strong) Extras community repository. In this three part blog series I’ll try to analyze what are the causes for this shortage and what needs to be done to remedy this situation lest it continue onto MeeGo and future Symbian versions.

There is quite a blizzard of very similar terms when it comes to discussing MeeGo and Qt matters, so I decided to put together a small dictionary which will hopefully clear up some terms and help follow up info on them. Don't worry if it's slightly confusing or contradictory at a first read, that's normal. Here we go, in alphabetical order:

By now the Apple - Adobe war is in full swing and the the sides in this conflict are stating that they hold the key to the technologies for the ultimate user experience. But let us just take a peek behind the big words and statements and see what exactly is on offer here.

One of the key differences between mobile and desktop development (apart from the obvious GUI stuff) is that applications cover different use cases from their desktop counterparts. How does this difference in application focus and required tool complexity reflect on open, modern, Linux based mobile platforms, and how does Nokia's newly announced Qt SDK address this ?

One of the key differences between mobile and desktop development (apart from the obvious GUI stuff) is that applications cover different use cases from their desktop counterparts. How does this difference in application focus and required tool complexity reflect on open, modern, Linux based mobile platforms, and how does Nokia's newly announced Qt SDK address this ?

I know you all like (cough) my long winded and analytical articles, but we'll take a short break from that to allow for a service announcement concerning our busy Qt developers, Maemo 5 and your evergreen favourite update, PR1.2.

If you're an end user, the short version is - the doors are open for more (and prettier) apps, plus we have a bridge that will make it easy to backport MeeGo apps to Maemo 5. If you're a developer and/or are interested in the gritty details, read on:

[Maemo community council hat]

One of the big changes PR1.2 brought us is official Qt support in the form of Q4.6 in the Nokia SDK and repositories. This change affects all applications depending on Qt currently in extras-devel. We had some talks with Qt/Nokia folks about Qt-related repository changes in Maemo 5 (triggered by aforementioned PR1.2 and potentially again later on by updates to Qt or related components). Here is the short summary:

as soon as 4.6 QtMobility is released, get those packages to the nokia-apps repository

remove 4.6 QtMobility from extras-devel

maybe upload new QtMobility packages to extras-devel, but only for qt4-experimental (4.7) and with 'experimental' in the package name

maintainers of bindings and extensions to Qt are encouraged to follow the same nomenclature in their package names (i.e. using experimental in the name if depending on qt4-experimental)

use a Provides/Replaces/etc libqt4-maemo5 clause in the qt4-experimental packages (Qt4.7 packages should be binary compatible with the current 4.6 ones) so the packages can be deprecated peacefully

QML/declarative will be released as part of Qt4.7 (so qt4-experimental only, no 4.6.2/PR1.2 support)

[/Maemo community council hat]

What does this mean in plain English ? The libqt4-maemo5-* package names are deprecated in extras-devel. Use libqt4-experimental-* if you need Qt4.7 features, or libqt4-* if you want Qt4.6. Qt4.5 will no longer be supported after the release of PR1.2